Pinochet in hospital for tests after stomach pain

Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator awaiting extradition from Britain, was taken to hospital yesterday with stomach pains.

The 83-year-old general was taken to the Princess Margaret hospital, in Windsor, but later returned to the house where he is staying in Wentworth, Surrey, under 24-hour guard.

The Chilean embassy said he received urinary tests.

The general is appealing against home secretary Jack Straw's decision to allow a Spanish request for extradition on torture charges to go ahead.

His lawyers will return to the high court on May 27 to seek judicial review.

'People who have seen him lately say his energies are running down,' said Fernando Barros, of the pro-Pinochet Chilean Reconciliation Movement.

Yesterday Britain's senior law lord, Lord Browne-Wilkinson, admitted, in a rare interview, that he and his colleagues had 'come up not looking too bright' in the Pinochet affair.

The law lords first upheld the general's arrest, then had to reconsider after it emerged that Lord Hoffman, one of the judges who ruled against him, had failed to disclose his links with Amnesty International, which was campaigning on the case.

In a second judgment, the lords again allowed extradition proceedings to go ahead, but on charges relating only to alleged offences after 1988.